Why Grimmel is a Weak Antagonist (HTTYD 3)

SPOILER ALERT FOR HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON: THE HIDDEN WORLD!

In my review of the third HTTYD film, I had mentioned that the villain was “smart and clever — which I absolutely appreciated — but he lacked elsewhere, making for a weaker brand of villain.” At the time I wrote that, I wasn’t able to place a finger on what Grimmel lacked. However, I think an online acquaintance and I have worked it out together after some discussion.

First things first, let’s talk about the good stuff that Grimmel is made of.

1. I found that he is a more realistic villain in that his goal is very personal. Unlike Drago (the villain from HTTYD 2) and a lot of Marvel villains (to whom I compared Grimmel), domination is not what he’s after. Grimmel’s pretty well just minding his own business and pretty happy to keep it that way. Literally all he wants is to kill the one Night Fury that appears to have alluded him throughout his dragon-killing (and specifically Night Fury-killing) career. He doesn’t really care about what happens to the village of Berk or the chieftains that hired him to round up dragons for them. As long as he can nab Toothless, Grimmel could care less about who is or isn’t caught in the crosshairs. In real life, most people aren’t out for world domination: they want to meet a smaller, personal objective. And that can be its own kind of scary. I think of Mother Gothel in Tangled: she just wanted to stay young forever, but the lengths she went to to achieve that simple goal are frightening.
2. Grimmel is smart. Very, very smart. He’s got a calculating mind, a thrill for the hunting process, and an understanding of his opponents’ psychology. This skillset, combined with his ego and Hiccup’s resistance to his plans, brings up a secondary goal of outsmarting Hiccup. What I like about this (besides seeing a cunning villain make trouble for the protagonist) is that Grimmel has a twofold personal attack on Hiccup: wanting to kill Toothless (which is plenty personal enough) and wanting to break down Hiccup by outsmarting him by a long shot (which makes it even more personal). His smarts and the threat he poses to Hiccup remind me of Moriarty in BBC’s Sherlock.
3. This is tied in with the former point, but I wanted to talk about it somewhat separately: Grimmel takes advantage of situations for an even more favourable outcome. He probably could have ended his hunt for Toothless very early in the movie, but he doesn’t because his eye is on a greater prize. (Granted, said “greater prize” is due to the fact that he was hired to round up dragons for Vikings who want to use them to go to war.) All the same, he drops his chance to get his hands on Toothless in order to use him and Hiccup to achieve all his directives at once.

So with all this stuff going for Grimmel, what’s wrong with him? (Again, credit to my online acquaintance for placing her finger on some specifics.)

1. Despite the fact that we spend a good bit of screentime with him, he doesn’t seem all that fleshed-out. Sure, we know his motives and he demonstrates his dangerous intelligence, but we don’t really get to know him. This isn’t anything new, really. Villains tend to get the short end of the character development stick, but I think it was a letdown for me to see Grimmel outside of a scene of direct conflict and still not really get him.
2. The consequences of his plans are… what? Besides the obvious one about his satisfaction in killing the last Night Fury, we don’t really know what he’s going to do after that. As I said before, he doesn’t care what happens to Berk or to the chieftains who hired him. So… if he kills Toothless (with or without the rest of Berk’s dragons), he just goes away? Never to bother Hiccup and the village again? I don’t think it’s unrealistic (after all, he’ll have everything he wants out of the conflict), but it weakens his standing as a villain. In short, the stakes don’t seem as high as they could be.

And yet, the more I thought about it, the less satisfied I was with the above answers. I still felt that there was something else to result in the narrative weakness of this villain.

And then I had it. Grimmel, I think, has the makings of a good, solid villain. It’s not his fault that he doesn’t come off that way.

It’s Hiccup‘s.

HTTYD 3 is an emotional story, delving deep into Hiccup’s heart. The whole point of the movie was for Hiccup to let Toothless go, to let him leave and build their lives apart from each other. It’s losing Toothless to the Light Fury and the Hidden World that poses the greatest emotional threat to Hiccup. As such, the story’s focus is centered around it. (And seriously, this movie nails that part. I love the way they treated it. And, because I recognize that this was the heart and soul of this movie, I understand why they chose to focus on it.)

So because the story’s focus is on the emotional parting of friends, that’s naturally where Hiccup’s focus is. He is so busy obsessing over Toothless’ romantic behaviour that he ends up not worrying about Grimmel as much as he should. And considering that Grimmel has single-handedly forced the entire village to relocate to a new island and will stop at nothing to take their dragons (and has the means by which to do it), Hiccup really should have taken him more seriously. But no, his one-track mind is all about getting Toothless’ girlfriend to acclimate to Berkian life so Hiccup will always have his best bud by his side.

If, then, all we needed for this movie was to work up to an emotional goodbye between friends, what’s the point of having Grimmel around besides action sequences?

Well, he’s not totally useless. If we try to cut him out of the movie, we have a scenario in which a Light Fury catches Toothless’ attention and woos him away. Without an outside threat, the Light Fury might have stuck around Berk and everyone would live happily ever after together forever. Conversely, Toothless could have left and there’d still be all the other dragons on Berk, which would likely weaken the emotional impact and the theme of life changes. Grimmel is a catalyst. He sets up an external conflict from which the central themes benefit. He prompts the search for the Hidden World. He proves the benefit that the subterranean cavern has of being a haven for dragons. His threat to Berk’s dragons raises Hiccup’s determination to protect them. This leads Hiccup to finally, willingly and actively, accept and even encourage Toothless’ departure, even after Grimmel is neutralized.

This is a good time to bring up something: a villain and an antagonist are not necessarily synonymous. They often are, but they don’t have to be. A villain is, very simply, someone who does bad things, whatever that definition of “bad things” is within a story. It’s a character description. An antagonist is what the protagonist has to struggle with and grow against. It’s a descriptor of what someone or something is within the story in opposition to the protagonist.

All of that to say… Grimmel is just a villain. He doesn’t embody the antithesis of any themes. He’s merely the means to an end, a starting point to get the story rolling, a reason to push the plot forward. The reason why he’s a weak antagonist is because he’s not the antagonist.